SPRINGFIELD, Ore. — On a cold, wet Wednesday evening in late October, Thurston High School football coach Justin Starck prepared his Colts for their final game of the regular season against the Willamette High School Wolverines. He stood in the middle of the field wearing a black rain jacket emblazoned with a red Thurston “T,” directing his players through a series of kickoff drills.

It’s been a long football journey for the Salem, Oregon native, who spent time as an offensive lineman at Walla Walla Community College and the University of Oregon in the early ’90s before heading overseas to play in NFL Europe. After returning home, he found his way to coaching, wanting to remain a part of the game he had dedicated his life to.

“It really was a transition and it was a substitution for — because I just missed the game so much and I still wanted to be a part of it,” Starck said. “I just missed the camaraderie and I missed all those things and so I wanted to get into coaching.”

He began his coaching career back in Eugene, first as a graduate assistant for the Oregon Ducks before joining the staff at Thurston as an offensive line coach in 1996. 

“I was fortunate to be able to be a graduate assistant with the Ducks for a while and then was able to come here and find a home here.”

It was during this time that Starck began to pursue teaching, joining a master's program to get his teaching license from UO. He was hired as an English and physical education teacher at Thurston in 1999, continuing to help with the football program before taking over as head coach in 2003. 

In what has now been more than 20 years leading the Colts, Starck has turned them into one of the top teams in Oregon’s 5A classification.

“We went to the state championship game in 2008 and learned a lot in that loss and then shortly after that we got moved up to 6A and we were awful,” Starck said. “We just got our tail whipped week in and week out for three or four years straight. And you learn a lot when you lose, and if you’re fortunate enough to keep your job — which thank goodness I was — you can come out on the other side and be a better coach for it.”

In 2013, Starck added athletic director to his responsibilities at Thurston, which he says has made him “more conscientious of team culture and more conscientious of what the players need as people, that they’re emotionally healthy and things like that.”

Starck’s program has been the model of consistency in recent years, not losing a league game from 2018 until this year while taking home back-to-back state championships in 2018 and 2019.

“Discipline and sticking to the script,” defensive line coach James Nosack said is what allows Starck to maintain his program’s consistency. “Thurston has a very distinct way of how we do things and that’s what we do, and that breeds success, year in and year out. Throughout each team throughout the years, throughout each position group, you do things the right way, you do things the Thurston way, and eventually success comes.”

Starck has garnered lots of respect from his staff, which features coaches who have been with the team for years. 

“Definitely someone you look up to,” said assistant head coach Don Lindsay, who is in his seventh season with Thurston. “With his experience, if he says something, he’s saying it for a reason. It means something.”

“When you create that kind of continuity, it means you’re doing the right thing teaching your guys,” Nosack said. “Because they want to stay, they want to learn, they want to continue with what’s going on. And if you can do that, again, it just relates to success, and that’s exactly what he’s done.

Thurston lost to Willamette by eight last Friday, running out of time to complete a comeback after falling behind 23-0 at halftime. Despite the loss, Starck knows his team will bounce back as they head into the playoffs, just like they did after suffering their first league loss since 2018 to Churchill back in October. 

“It’s just all part of the process,” he said. “We were able to get to a bye week shortly after that game and really dedicate ourselves to the weight room, just getting a little bit stronger and trying to be a more physical football team. That’s what it taught us, is when we’re physical enough.”

Throughout it all, though, Starck is always focused on the task at hand, which on Friday will be leading his 7-2 Colts to a win over Mountain View in the first round of the 5A state playoffs.